“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In my notes introducing Volume 1, I wrote about placing the basic “artistic ideas” embodied in the Seth material at our conscious, aesthetic, and practical service in daily life. That’s really what Seth’s work is all about, in my opinion. Such an endeavor essentially involves the pursuit of an ideal, and represents our attempts to give physical and mental shape to the great inner, creative commotion of the universe that each person intuitively feels. Of course Jane and I want Seth’s ideas and our own to touch responsive reflexes within others; then each individual can use the material in his or her own expression of that useful ideal, letting it serve to stimulate inner perceptions.

What Jane has to offer results from the study of consciousness itself, as it’s expressed through her own experience and abilities. By choice, she has no buffers between herself and the exterior world — no assured status, for example. She doesn’t enjoy the protection a scientist does, who probes into a particular subject in depth, then makes a learned report on it from an “objective” position that’s safely outside the field of study. At the same time, I know that Jane feels a responsibility to “publish her results,” and make them available to others. She’s tough in ways that science, for instance, doesn’t understand at all.

“When you thoroughly understand what is meant by the entire safe-universe concept, then the physical, cultural climate is seen as a medium through which the ideal can be expressed. The ideal is meaningless if it is not physically manifest to one degree or another. The ideal seeks expression. In so doing, it often seems to change or alter in ways that are not understood. Yet those distortions may be the very openings that allow others to perceive.

“In a way, with [this] book and with your art, your purpose is the expression of the ideal, and that expression must be physically materialized, obviously. Your joy, your challenge, should be in the manifestation of the ideal as you see it, whether or not you can in your terms count the consequences or the impediments — whether or not the expression comes to fulfillment in your terms — and even if it seems to fall on ground on which it will not grow.

“As an artist alone your purpose is expression, which involves disclosures, the difference between the ideal and the actual. Be reckless in the expression of the ideal, and it will never betray you. Treat it with kid gloves and you are in the middle of a battle.”